Tuesday, July 4, 2017

Books to fuel the how-young-is-too-young debate

Only three years ago, the eminent children’s book writer and artist Walter Dean Myers wrote an opinion article in The New York Times lamenting the paucity of children’s books with African-American protagonists and themes. His concerns at the time were substantiated in documentation by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin, which reported that of 3,200 children’s books published in 2013, only 93 were about black people. (The 2016 figures reflect a jump: Out of 3,400 books received at the center, 286 are about black people.)